Attensity Acquires Biz360, Shows Roadmap to Social CRM

Today Attensity – an analytics and eService vendor – announced they were acquiring Biz360 – a community and social media monitoring vendor. Biz360’s main product will be relabeled Attensity 360 and be offered as part of the Attensity portfolio, pricing will be similar to what is available today. Attensity announced earlier this year a partnership with Radian6 to analyze the output from Radian6’s tracking and monitoring. They are now embedding those capabilities in their product for a deeper integration, although they will continue to work with Radian6 and similar solutions that want to leverage the Attensity analytics engine.

During a briefing with them earlier this week we discussed the commingling of assets and the resulting solution. One of the key points, at least for me, is that Attensity now has all the components in place to offer three things:

A more complete solution for their eService product by adding community and social media monitoring and tracking

A tighter integration between their analytics product and social media monitoring

A roadmap for a SCRM product by integrating the three main components of SCRM: analytics, CRM functionality, and social media.

Of course, the key question is whether or not this will work (operationally speaking), to which I can say that since I was not involved in the due diligence looking at the architectures technologies I have no idea. You should be cautious as to the promises, manage and monitor your risks factors, but I see no roadblocks to execution. Both companies have embraced open and hosted models for their solutions, and they both can be deployed on a SOA with integration provided by the core architecture. At the very least, you would end up with two hosted products with tight integration. At the very best, with a SCRM solution that offer service and support. I do have faith in them, have been working with Attensity for analytics and Empolis and Living-e for eService for some time and they do deliver on what they promise.

Of course, I will continue to work with them to push them to do better — so you always have that to mitigate risks…

What do you think? Should Social Media, Analytics, and CRM functions integrate to create Social CRM? Something else missing from that – no pun intended – analysis?

disclaimer: Attensity is a client, Biz360 is not — rather it is now (darn, I just engage with them last week). Attensity did not pay me to write this, or to publish it, or to do much about it. My access to information was not privileged as I received no advance notice beyond what normal people (who just happen to be analysts) would. The opinions above are mine, duh, and they represent my evaluation of the current situation. If you happen to find this post in, say 30 years, and you make decisions then based on that — your loss, not mine. Disagree with my opinions (and you are not a competitor or stalker-type)? Comments are wide open for you to use.

Esteban,
Good insights. I find especially intriguing (and I suppose this is what you meant by “analytics” but perhaps not) the semantic analysis of unstructured enterprise data. That, in combination with the social web analytics and CRM platform integration, is one very, very impressive combination – a very unique type of social CRM. No? Just curious: Are there any enterprise social CRM platforms to your knowledge that integrate with enterprise data semantic analytics? What specific industry verticals are likely to have the most interest in Attensity360?
Thanks, in advance, for your response!
.-= Hugh Macken´s last blog ..Social Media Monitoring Live Q & A =-.

This is an evolving market, breaking news as they say in the biz — it is forming as it is evolving. I am certain that there are some vendors / startups working on that as it is the holy grail of using data (analysis based on semantics? very hot — also very hard), but not to my knowledge.

The above sentence is called a call-to-action — someone will come in the next few days and tell me about 10 companies i did not know that do it, btw.

I don’t think this is a vertical play, it is more of a model play right now – as in B2C (if you still believe in those models) over B2B. You can, of course, derive from verticals from those models, but still breaking news — so nothing set in stone.

Will see where it goes…

BTW, there are no enterprise Social CRM platforms for any type — yet.We will see more M&A and progress in the next 12-18 months as the market gets defined and we get more clarity on what SCRM will look like.